8/14/2008 @ 9:20PM

The Most Powerful Coach in Sports

College football has long been a big business. But the money and control Alabama gave Nick Saban raised the stakes to an unprecedented level. Is he worth it?

On New Year’s Day in 2007 Mal Moore, the athletic director at the University of Alabama, boarded a private plane bound for Miami. A little over a month earlier the university had fired Mike Shula, its fourth football coach in eight mediocre years. The pursuit of a new coach to that point had been bungled badly–the once proud program was reportedly turned down by Steve Spurrier, from South Carolina, and Rich Rodriguez, at the time the coach at West Virginia. Moore was on his way to Miami to try to woo Nick Saban, then the coach of the NFL’s Dolphins. It was all-or-nothing, with no real backup plan. “I told the pilots when they dropped me off in Miami that if I didn’t come back to this plane with Nick Saban, they should just go on and take me to Cuba,” Moore says.

Saban, a onetime head coach at Louisiana State, fretted over the decision to leave Miami for two restless days, then took the job and flew with Moore back to Tuscaloosa–and into a national media outcry in which he was called a “weasel,” a “loser” and “Nick Satan” for leaving Miami after publicly denying interest in the Alabama job.

But in Tuscaloosa, which was desperate to return to national football prominence, Saban, 56, was a savior, welcomed with an open wallet. Saban, with his agent, James E. Sexton II, negotiated an eight-year, $32 million contract that was, at the time, the highest salary ever paid to a college coach. It remains among the highest and is bigger than all but a handful of NFL coaching salaries. His deal includes, among other perks, 25 hours of private use of a university airplane, two cars and a country club membership, extras that make his annual compensation closer to $5 million a year, estimates Smith College economics professor Andrew Zimbalist. He can leave the school at any time without financial penalty, a rarity in big-time college coaching contracts.

What’s more, he was given total control of the football program: recruiting, coaching, business administration and public relations. There are coaches at other universities who have similar salaries, like Charlie Weis at Notre Dame and Pete Carroll at the University of Southern California. But no coach, including those in the professional leagues, can match Saban’s combination of money, control and influence. Saban, now entering his second year as the coach of the Alabama Crimson Tide, is the most powerful coach in sports.

Handing Saban the keys was a business decision. Bigger TV contracts and bowl game payouts helped push revenues for the Division 1-a colleges to $2 billion, up 25% in four years. Saban has already had an impact. At his first spring practice game 92,000 fans showed up. The waiting list for season tickets tripled after his arrival to 10,000. A stalled 10,000-seat stadium expansion now seems inevitable.

Alabama’s football program had $54 million in revenue this past year and an estimated $32 million profit. The profit is used to pay off the athletic department’s $130 million debt for capital improvements. Football finances 77% of the athletic department, bankrolling nonrevenue sports like swimming and softball. It also has kicked back millions of dollars to university academic programs.

But the economics of hiring Saban go well beyond athletics. The decidedly pro-football University of Alabama’s president, Robert Witt, points to the school’s recent $500 million capital campaign as an example. “We have had 100,000 donors in that campaign, and a major reason they support us is football,” he says. It’s no different at any other college with a football team. Why do Ivy League schools even bother to field teams that are never going to win a bowl game? It keeps the alumni money flowing. That’s how you pay for the English department.

Witt says Saban’s presence helps the school’s academics by attracting strong applicants. In the 2007–08 year 57% of the students enrolled were in the top quarter of their high school class, up from 54% the year before. “Having a coach of his caliber makes it easier to recruit better students and raise more money,” says Witt.

All of which may overcome resentment from professors (average salary at Alabama: $116,000) of Saban’s contract. Witt can also argue that not a penny of Saban’s salary comes from either students or taxpayers. It comes from athletic department revenue, which consists of broadcasting fees, ad sponsorships, donations from “boosters” (alums who give to football, not the university’s general fund), ticket sales and shoe and apparel endorsements.

Saban ended his first year with a 7–6 record. But it takes a while for a coach to put his stamp on a team. Recruiting is where it all starts. In three of his five years at lsu, Saban had top-rated recruiting classes, meaning the 25 high school seniors drawn to a college by a football scholarship. His 2008 recruiting class at Alabama was the consensus number one in the country and included a prized high school receiver named Julio Jones from Foley, Ala.

When he visits a recruit, he says, “I tell them this is a 40-year decision, not a 4-year one.” He stresses the importance of his players’ being successful as people, as students and as athletes. Queen Marvin, the mother of Julio Jones, says: “He came in here and talked about education. That’s what I want for my son. Football won’t always be there.”

Saban’s actions even spurred a new NCAA (National Collegiate Athletic Association) recruiting rule. The sneeringly nicknamed “Saban Rule” was enacted to prohibit coaches from visiting high schools in the spring, something Saban had traditionally done. So he came up with a way around it. He used videoconferencing equipment to talk to recruits and coaches face-to-face via computer, a tactic within the NCAA rules. Saban views the NCAA in the way that a tax attorney sees the IRS. “You have to maximize your benefits,” he says.

Once he gets a player in the program, Saban becomes a Big Brother. He instituted a summer weight-training program. There are penalty points for missed classes and practices. All players have to attend personal growth seminars taught by Seattle’s Pacific Institute. Saban also brings in speakers, including police officers and a former member of a mob family to talk about gambling. “We’re trying to create thoughts, habits and priorities,” he says. The program hasn’t been wholly successful on that front yet. Ten players have been arrested since he took over. (All but one of the players arrested were recruited by the former regime.)

Saban preaches about “control” to his players and staff. He’s closed all but a few minutes of most Alabama practices, something no other coach there has done. He forbids his players to use the word “hot” during summer practices. While with the Dolphins, he turned down an invitation to dine with President Bush so as not to miss practice.

Saban has also set about to boost donations and spread the word about his team. One way is to bring together the traditionally balkanized Alabama football booster groups, the alums who raise money and act as ambassadors for the program. He’s subjected two dozen or so of them to one-hour interviews to determine their worthiness. “I don’t call him, he calls me,” says Elliot Maisel, an Alabama booster and the chief executive of Gulf Distributing Holdings, a beer wholesaler in Mobile.

With Saban’s wide territory comes the job of managing public relations. That hasn’t gone so well. The bad press Saban received after leaving Miami continued in his first year at Alabama. He snapped at reporters after losses. He rudely compared the Louisiana-Monroe and Mississippi State losses during the season to Sept. 11 and Pearl Harbor. “I’ve had my share of issues since I left Miami,” he says. “I feel responsible for being able to manage the public relations better.” He personally authorizes all interviews with his players and assistant coaches. “You’d like to have one message with multiple voices,” he says. “But it sure is easier to control with only one voice.”

Saban grew up in the mining town of Monongah, W.Va., pumping gas and fixing flat tires at his father’s gas station. He went to Kent State University, playing defensive back on the football team. “I figured I would run a car dealership, that it was better to sell cars than fix them up,” he says.

When Saban graduated, Terry, his wife of now 36 years, still had a year to go. So Saban decided to stick around and took a job as a graduate assistant on the football team in 1973. Over the next 17 years he had a succession of assistant coaching jobs, most notably with Syracuse, West Virginia and Ohio State, and with the NFL’s Houston Oilers. He left Houston in 1991 to become the defensive coordinator for the Cleveland Browns under head coach Bill Belichick, now of the New England Patriots. “Bill and I were a lot alike,” says Saban. “We spent hours just talking about defensive strategies.”

In 1995 he was hired as the head coach at Michigan State, where he turned around a team that had not had a winning season in the five years prior to his arrival. In 1999 he was hired by Louisiana State, where in five years he won two Southeastern Conference Championships and a national championship in 2003.

Wayne Huizenga, the owner of the Dolphins, came calling in 2005, and Saban took the head coaching job. But he became quickly disillusioned with pro ball. “You were almost penalized for success,” he says. A good year meant lower draft picks and a more difficult schedule. “In the NFL you get one first-round draft pick if you’re lucky,” says Saban. “You couldn’t really outwork anybody else. In college I could recruit ten players with first-round talent every year.”

But the main difference had to do with control. In the NFL a coach has to contend with the owner, who is not likely to be a shy or unassuming person, and with a general manager, who makes player personnel decisions and holds the purse strings. In his second year with the Dolphins the team brought in two free-agent quarterbacks, Drew Brees and Dante Culpepper, both of whom were coming off injuries. Saban wanted Brees. The Dolphins medical staff cleared only Culpepper. Brees went on to win 11 games that year with the New Orleans Saints. Culpepper played only 4 games before succumbing to an injury. Saban compiled a two-year record of 15–17 with the Dolphins.

Enter Alabama, a football program that was steeped in a glorious past–under Paul (Bear) Bryant, who won six national championships–and a mediocre present, but with a fan base still as rabid as any in the country. “In the late 1950s and early 1960s, when Alabama was last in everything–education, highway funding, progress in civil rights–the one thing people could take pride in was the success of the Alabama football team,” says Paul Finebaum, a radio host and newspaper columnist in Birmingham.

After Bryant retired in 1982, the team went mostly downhill. There were NCAA sanctions for recruiting violations (including three years of bans from lucrative bowl games), a coach accused of sexual harassment followed by one fired before even coaching a game, after an alleged trip to a strip club. Mike Shula, a former Alabama player and the son of a famous NFL coach, Don Shula, was canned after having only one winning season in four years.

Can Saban deliver? With his power comes the burden of immediate gratification. “We expect him to be successful,” says Witt. Saban says he can’t control the lofty expectations, but “I wouldn’t want to coach anyplace where they didn’t expect to win.”